Silver halide color photographic materials generally comprise a support having thereon a multilayered light-sensitive layer composed of three kinds of silver halide emulsion layers selectively sensitized so as to have sensitivity to blue light, green light, and red light, in which each light-sensitive layer contains a photographic coupler capable of developing yellow, magenta or cyan. A color image can be obtained by exposing the above-mentioned light-sensitive material followed by color development processing with a color developer. In the color development processing, an aromatic primary amine color developing agent and the photographic coupler are oxidatively coupled to produce an azomethine or indophenol type dye. In order to obtain a color image with satisfactory color reproduction, it is important that the thus developed dye is a clear yellow, magenta or cyan dye with little side adsorption.
While pyrazolone compounds have been used as magenta couplers, dyes formed by the pyrazolone couplers show unfavorable side absorption, and improvement on this aspect has been demanded. In order to solve this problem, pyrazolotriazole couplers with reduced side absorption were proposed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,725,065, 3,810,761, 3,758,309, and 3,725,067. However, these improved pyrazolotriazole couplers were still insufficient in terms of color developability. Studies for improvement of color developability had been continued as can be seen from the proposals described in JP-A-60-55343, JP-A-60-98434, JP-A-61-120152, JP-A-4-260033, JP-A-4-289852, and JP-A-5-204106 (the term "JP-A" as used herein means an "unexamined published Japanese patent application"). However, none of the so far proposed compounds did not reach a satisfactory level. In particular, with the recent advances in processing speed, color developability of these compounds has now turned to be insufficient, still demanding further improvement.
Further, azomethine dyes formed by the pyrazolotriazole couplers disclosed in the U.S. patents listed above have low resistance to light, which has significantly impaired the quality of color photographic materials, especially those for printing. Hence, studies were conducted aiming at improvement of light stability as described in JP-B-5-88457, JP-B-6-1358, JP-B-6-8950 (the term "JP-B" as used herein means an "examined published Japanese patent application"), JP-A-5-323530, and JP-A-5-313326. Nevertheless, light stability of the magenta dyes formed by the compounds disclosed in these publications was still insufficient, and further improvement has been demanded.
On the other hand, various efforts have been made to apply pyrazolotriazole couplers to color reversal light-sensitive materials as disclosed in JP-A-5-204106. However, conventional pyrazolotriazole couplers do not exhibit both sufficient color developability and dye image storage stability when used in color reversal light-sensitive materials.